NAME

DESCRIPTION

Nama is a lightweight digital audio workstation based on Ecasound. It is suitable for multitrack recording, mixing, effects-processing and other audio processing tasks.

New projects begin with a mixer, and may include tracks, buses, effects, sends, inserts, marks, regions, fades, edits and sequences.

Command language and help system

Nama provides a command interpreter with help system and GUI. Commands have full names and shortcuts (e.g. "add-effect" and "afx"). Commands may to be iterated over multiple tracks.

Nama has the concept of a currently selected object. At any time, there is usually a current bus, current track and current effect and current parameter. Track commands will act on the current track, bus commands on the currently selected bus, effect commands on the currently selected effect/parameter.

The help system provides searchable access to documentation for all Nama commands and shortcuts, and for LADSPA, LV2 and Ecasound effects.

In addition to executing its own commands, Nama will pass commands to Ecasound, Midish, the perl interpreter and the shell.

GUI

Nama's GUI will display if Tk is available. Nama can spawn Audacity or MHWaveedit to view/edit selected waveforms.

Project management

Project state is serialized as JSON files and the entire project history is managed by Git. Projects can be branched, and easily restored to earlier states.

Project reuse

Three types of templates are available to reuse project components: effect chains, effect profiles, and project templates. An effect chain is a series of effects with parameters. An effect profile includes one or more tracks with their effects and inserts. Nama's mastering network is stored as an effect profile.

INSTALLATION

Installing Nama and its Perl Dependencies from CPAN

The following command will install Nama, automatically pulling in all Perl modules required to run Nama in text mode:

cpanm Audio::Nama

However if you don't have cpanm, this should still work:

PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 cpan Audio::Nama

To use the GUI, you will need to install Tk:

cpanm Tk

You may optionally install Audio::Ecasound to run Ecasound via libecasoundc:

cpanm Audio::Ecasound

You can browse the sources or download a tarball via:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Audio-Nama

Building from Source

If you want to inspect or modify Nama's internals, or keep up with new developments, you can pull the source code as follows:

git clone git://github.com/bolangi/nama.git

Consult the BUILD file for build instructions.

Non-Perl Dependencies

The Ecasound audio processing libraries should be installed. Ecasound should be compiled with support for LADSPA, libsndfile, libsamplerate and JACK. Ecasound may be obtained from http://ecasound.seul.org/ecasound/ or as precompiled binary package for your Un*x distribution.

The LADSPA SDK is required to autosense LADSPA plugins and scaling hints. It is available at:

http://www.ladspa.org/ladspa_sdk/download.html

In particular the utility program 'analyseplugin' must be installed in a directory in your execution PATH.

Nama's mastering mode uses a number of LADSPA plugins in a reasonably flat starting configuration. provided that the user installs the plugins listed in the default configuration file .namarc.

Git is required to utilize Nama's project management and and undo features.